Workers Face Hurdles

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Exposed to Solvent, Worker Faces Hurdles

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By FELICITY BARRINGER

Published: January 24, 2009

BEREA, Ky. — When the University of Kentucky published new research in 2008 suggesting that exposure to a common industrial solvent might increase the risk for Parkinson’s disease, the moment was a source of satisfaction to Ed Abney, a 53-year-old former tool-and-die worker.

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Carla Winn for The New York Times

Ed Abney, of Berea, Ky., has Parkinson’s disease after two decades of working with a solvent. He has had trouble proving a link.

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Carla Winn for The New York Times

Anita Susan Abney watched her husband go through articles and pictures of his medical history. Dr. Don M. Gash, top, one of the researchers figuring in the case, and Dr. John T. Slevin, another.

Mr. Abney, now sidelined by Parkinson’s, had spent more than two decades up to his elbows in a drum of the solvent, trichloroethylene, while he cleaned metal piping at a now-shuttered Dresser Industries plant here.

The university study had focused on him and his factory co-workers who worked near the same 55-gallon drum of the vaguely sweet-smelling chemical. It found that 27 workers had either the anxiety, tremors, rigidity or other symptoms associated with Parkinson’s, or had motor skills that were significantly impaired, compared with a healthy peer group. The study, Mr. Abney thought, was the scientific evidence he needed to claim worker’s compensation benefits.

He was wrong. The medical researchers would not sign the form attesting that Mr. Abney’s disease was linked to his work.

Individuals like Mr. Abney are caught between the conflicting imperatives of...